


Darkest Before Dawn

by Umbralpilot



Category: Ravages of Time
Genre: Also viewable with shipper goggles, Angsty Schmoop, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-27
Updated: 2012-08-27
Packaged: 2017-11-13 00:29:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/497368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Umbralpilot/pseuds/Umbralpilot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Guō Jiā and Jiǎ Xǔ after Xiàpī. The one who should die lives, and the ones who should have lived are dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Darkest Before Dawn

**Author's Note:**

> This one's just rampant self-indulgence really. I wanted Guō Jiā to babysit Jiǎ Xǔ for once, and before you know it... Eight Geniuses fluff, attempt two: FAILED.
> 
> Remember: Loyal and filial Three Kingdoms ficcers mark their Pīnyīn!

Guō Jiā knows a great many things, more than most men will ever know in their lifetime. He knows how to trap an opponent, how to strike a deal and how to engineer a betrayal, knows how a hundred troop formations and a thousand tricks of war, how to administer the nation and how to change dynasties. But one thing that he does not know – and this surprises him as much as anyone else – he doesn’t have the slightest idea how to care for another’s misery. He doesn’t know, although he had been in that selfsame position more times than he cares to recall – he knows how to brew tea, how to keep a room warm, even a little on how to mix medicine. But that has nothing to do with comfort: and he knows as much, and it drives him slightly mad.

Jiǎ Xǔ makes a terrible patient to care for, graceless and foul-tempered and scathingly critical of every gesture however well meant. Guō Jiā privately suspects that he doesn’t have the slightest idea how to be ill. 

He isn’t altogether certain why he is there at all, why he should be anywhere near his classmate now: “Go away, Fourth,” Jiǎ Xǔ had said when he saw him come in. “You’ll catch my cold and die, and our lord will blame me.” But there is little for him to do in the night with the campaign done and Xiàpī taken, neither the stamina nor the inclination to sit through their lord’s banquets, and not the stomach to toast deaths like Chén Gōng’s. He finds his way to the sickroom and doesn’t find his way out again. 

It almost thrills him, at first, that he cannot explain his own actions: that he has no plan for this situation, never mind a hundred more to back it up. He probes his way on feeling, on instinct, on memories that he did not quite realize he had. “If you don’t rest, I’ll be clearing the weeds from your grave in the spring,” he tells his classmate sternly. He putters about the room, arranging the covers, brewing a weak tea that Jiǎ Xǔ pronounces horrid, he leaves and returns with a bowl of yam and rice soup that the cooks assure him is a genuine Xīliáng dish. Jiǎ Xǔ, for his part, does hardly more than sneeze and complain, the latter growing weaker as the former wears him out. The covers are too heavy or too light, the room is too hot or too cold, the soup is a mockery of his hometown’s cooking. Guō Jiā doesn’t argue. He doesn’t become angry: they are both feeling their way around something vastly unfamiliar. If they were still boys in Water Mirror’s house, they would laugh.

But they are not, and it’s been years: years since Guō Jiā had been uncertain or hesitant or had to reconsider anything obvious, years since that night after Cháng’ān. It’s only when Jiǎ Xǔ waves him away, curls about himself with his long limbs and coughs and coughs – a wet, ragged, tearing and scraping sound that makes Guō Jiā’s own throat close, that drives a spike of white sympathetic pain up into his own lungs – that he truly realizes that what he feels is worry.

“You’ve finally killed Lǚ Bù, our lord and all his subordinates salute you, and what do you do? Ride out in the blizzard to inspect the heads and get sick,” he murmurs, leaning in – closing in despite his better judgment, coming altogether too close – to rest a hand on his classmate’s back as Jiǎ Xǔ catches his breath. “You’re worse than me.”

Jiǎ Xǔ snorts, though it makes him cough again. “No one is worse than you,” he says in a cold deadpan underpinned by the faint, deep-running vein of fondness. 

He doesn’t say what he’d been looking for, out there for half the night about the crumbling city wall, with the winter winds that had been Xiàpī’s real foe howling like wolves, where Lǚ Bù’s head freezes on an iron spike, silent and still and doomed; and Guō Jiā doesn’t ask. He knows, of course – even if he didn’t have his scouts and whisperers, to tell him of the little shrine that the Third Genius has made for his dead master under the murderer’s head and of his long hours kneeling there, he would have known. But he doesn’t speak of it. He knows a great many things, but he doesn’t know what to say.

“Go away, Fourth,” Jiǎ Xǔ tells him again, turning on his side and dragging the covers up over his face until only the fall of his loose hair shows. His voice is worn into softness, the careful, correct tones that he affects day to day giving way to his native accent. And he should do just that, Guō Jiā thinks – he should go now, now. There are plenty of others, from Cáo Cāo himself and down, who’d gladly keep the sick man company, at least for as long as they could endure the biting wit that his illness only loosens. It’s foolish of him to tempt fate.

“Haha, as if I’d miss this,” he instead says, grinning. “I understand now why you’re always at my bedside. Fretting about shīxiōng’s health makes me feel strong.”

Under his hand on the covers, he feels Jiǎ Xǔ’s shoulders tense. “You fool, you know that isn’t – “ he begins sharply, until a convulsive sneeze cuts him off, in time to be reminded about the things that cannot be said. He shifts and turns his back to Guō Jiā and mutters something barely intelligible about how no one ever takes his good advice.

Guō Jiā doesn’t argue. He knows.

He should go: he should have gone hours before, he should never have come. But he stays, tending the fire and drinking his horrid tea and bickering with Jiǎ Xǔ until his classmate’s breath slows, falls into the rhythms of a fitful, fevered sleep. His better judgment fails him again, and he shifts the covers slightly, just so he can see the other’s face. He feels strangely lost like this, sitting at another’s bedside, he feels very young. Once or twice, when the Third Genius coughs and shivers in his sleep, he thinks that he ought to call Xún Yù – he gets as far as rising to his feet, as far as the door. But then he turns around again, and goes back to kneeling by the couch.

The night stretches on, but there is no one there to scold him into finding his own bed. He almost dozes off where he kneels when Jiǎ Xǔ’s coughing startles him awake, to straighten with faint, sudden alarm. His classmate turns in restless sleep, his face taut and his long hair matted with a feverish sweat. His breath comes in shallow snatches, perhaps with pain.

“My lord… Lǐ Rú…” he murmurs, “Niú Fǔ… Dǒng Yuè … Lord Cáo is favored by Heaven, please understand…”

His eyes snap open just as Guō Jiā stands over him, one hand hovering at the very edge of touch.

“Go away, Fèngxiào,” he rasps. “Don’t die because of me… not you, too.”

Guō Jiā stares at him for a moment, stares at his eyes: glassy with fever, but sharp, hard, aware, and he knows that Jiǎ Xǔ knows what he’d heard. The thought occurs to him that it’s too late, one way or another. It’s too late to do anything but stay.

“How you underestimate me,” he says softly, and settles back down on the couch. 

Jiǎ Xǔ tries to give him a cutting look, but his eyes are too bleary for it, and as he struggles to sit up the cough silences him again, deep and glass-sharp and unending. For this, Guō Jiā knows what to do. He helps him straighten, pushes a handkerchief into his hand and helps him pick his cup from the bedside table and drink the horrid tea until the fit quiets. And it’s too late, so he stays, his hand on Jiǎ Xǔ’s back and all tangled in his long hair, as others have done for him a dozen, a hundred times over.

“Wénhé, you can rest,” he murmurs. “Lǚ Bù is dead. You’ve done it. Now get well, or I’ll take all the credit.”

For a long moment Jiǎ Xǔ is still. His hair hangs in his eyes, heavy and damp, and his breathing is slow, deliberate. For a moment he stands on some edge, and Guō Jiā can only wait, uneasy, unprepared. There are things that have never been said between them, even between the two of them.

“I know what you’re thinking,” the Fourth Genius whispers, softly, softly. “It’s the fever talking. You’ll regret later. _Don’t._ ”

But Jiǎ Xǔ shakes his head. “Since when have _you_ lied for pity?” he returns. The words slip from him, not angry, but infinitely tired. “The credit… you, Second Brother, and Sīmǎ Yì. What have I done but bring you three together…? My one trick… I couldn’t even take Sīmǎ Yì’s head. I’m a fraud. I really am a fraud.”

There are things that mustn’t be said, Guō Jiā knows: some understandings that only the two of them share, as they share their devotion to darkness, things that must never come to light, masks that never come off. There are places that their genius doesn’t, cannot reach if they are to be who they are. But it is too late: too late, and there are no others.

“You know that I need Sīmǎ Yì’s head where it is. I would have needed to save him – to stop you.” He leans closer, so that even his barest whisper is heard. He knows that he cannot anticipate the response: they are beyond each other’s power of prediction, have always been. Perhaps it is because they have never quite managed to be opponents. 

But he adds, “Xǔ-ge, you haven’t failed. Heaven was on my side.”

He waits another moment, a long, breathless moment; and then there is a tremor under his hand, a shaky intake of air. Jiǎ Xǔ’s hair still curtains his face, still hides his eyes, but he sinks slowly forward and into his classmate’s support, slowly, slowly; and Guō Jiā stays, and stays still, until the other man’s brow rests against his shoulder, and he can feel the shallow, uneven heat of the Third Genius’ breath as it wavers, and catches between a cough and a sob.

“The one who should die lives, and the ones who should’ve lived are dead,” he says brokenly. “What good is someone who can only win by sacrificing good men…?”

Once more, Guō Jiā hesitates – how strange it is, to hesitate. In the end he knows one thing only; he’d known it since that night after Cháng’ān.

“Even if you have no talent,” he says, “why not, for the sake of the nation…”

Jiǎ Xǔ’s breath catches again, in a sound almost like a chuckle, bitter and without humor. He shakes his head, eyes tightly closed.

“I’ve sacrifice you,” he murmurs.

After that, there is silence: there is nothing more to say. Everything has been said now, and too late to be taken back. But Guō Jiā stays: he stays to keep the fire burning, to watch his classmate sleep, fevered still but calmer somehow, softer somehow, breathing deep without the ragged, desperate edge. Or perhaps it’s his imagination: perhaps it’s foolish of him to think that he can ease another’s misery simply by being close, by staying though they both know the price he might pay. He cannot say, he does not know: it is beyond his calculation, as though he was a boy again in Water Mirror’s house, for the first time meeting those men he’d come to call his brothers. But he stays until sleep takes him, deep in Xiàpī’s cold night.

When he wakes up again, it is dawn.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry, Ki Shodar shoutbox, I'll go jump in a river now...


End file.
